Ascendant Sun: A New Novel in the Saga of the Skolian Empire by Catherine Asaro Page B
Authors: Catherine Asaro
Ads: Link
ships.
"Commander Garlin?" The voice of Lieutenant Ty Rillwater, the communications officer, murmured in space around him.
Attending , Kelric answered. The Corona digitized his thought and sent the data to Ty's console, which turned it into speech. His words came out of her console as if he were part of the ship's EI.
"Kelric, don't do that!" Ty protested. "It gives me the jee-zeebs."
Smiling, he thought, Translate "jee-zeebs." The Corona sent his inquiry to her console.
Ty groaned. "Stop it! You sound like a computer."
I am a computer, he thought. Did you have a message for me?
"We'll hit the border zone in about thirty minutes," she said.
I'll be ready . He turned his focus inward. Corona, give me your most recent data on the border surface between the Skolian Imperialate and Eubian Concord. I'm interested in the area where we will cross into Trader space.
Done .
His mindscape formed into a new display, giving him a 3-D map of the border zone. A red volume filled the top of the map, indicating Trader space. The surface separating it from Skolian space continually shifted as the Corona made adjustments. A few of its revisions came from the scant data it received from other starships or outposts, but most were its own predictions on how boundaries were fluctuating in the current chaos.
According to their most recent data, the Traders had no outpost in this region and ISC had a small naval base. Kelric hoped the base still existed; it would increase their chances of safe passage and he might learn more from it about the current state of ISC.
Right now they were traveling in inversion. To invert, they added an imaginary component to their speed. Making speed complex removed the light-speed singularity from the equations of special relativity. The ship went "around" light speed the way a hovercar might leave the road to go around an infinitely high pole. Beyond the pole, they resumed their journey— at superluminal speeds, a realm of the bizarre.
A superluminal ship could go into the past. With a longing so intense it hurt, Kelric wished he could go back and stop the deaths of his family. If only. But every ship that had tried returning to normal space prior to when it inverted either failed or vanished, possibly into an alternate universe where it couldn't meddle with its own causality.
Even if he did somehow go into his past, the need for consistency would probably make it impossible to alter history. It was the time analog of a mundane situation, his magcar passing a slower car. To him, his car would stay still while the slow car went backward. People in the slow car thought they stayed still while he went forward. But they all saw the cars end up in the same place. Their view of how it happened differed, but was consistent. No paradoxes. So it was with time. Events had to be consistent whether he ran the reel of his life forward or backward. He couldn't undo what had happened, and wishing for the impossible only made his grief hurt more.
Superluminal travel bedeviled the flotilla. With no web, how did ships converse? Beam light back and forth? Useless. It could never catch up. Throw tachyons? As long as the particles remained superluminal, they could hop, skip, and jump all over time. Then there was time contraction and space dilation; the faster their ship went, the faster their time passed and the longer they stretched out relative to slower objects. A crew didn't notice on their own ship because they were at rest relative to it. But no two ships or particles moved at the same rate, and at such humongous speeds even small differences had big effects. How did you talk to ships smeared out across light-years, with time running at different rates on all of them? It was a mess.
Maccar regularly had Anatakala drop the ships into real space so Ty could try contacting the ISC base. In the normal universe nothing went faster than light, so no one expected a timely answer from the base when they were several
"Commander Garlin?" The voice of Lieutenant Ty Rillwater, the communications officer, murmured in space around him.
Attending , Kelric answered. The Corona digitized his thought and sent the data to Ty's console, which turned it into speech. His words came out of her console as if he were part of the ship's EI.
"Kelric, don't do that!" Ty protested. "It gives me the jee-zeebs."
Smiling, he thought, Translate "jee-zeebs." The Corona sent his inquiry to her console.
Ty groaned. "Stop it! You sound like a computer."
I am a computer, he thought. Did you have a message for me?
"We'll hit the border zone in about thirty minutes," she said.
I'll be ready . He turned his focus inward. Corona, give me your most recent data on the border surface between the Skolian Imperialate and Eubian Concord. I'm interested in the area where we will cross into Trader space.
Done .
His mindscape formed into a new display, giving him a 3-D map of the border zone. A red volume filled the top of the map, indicating Trader space. The surface separating it from Skolian space continually shifted as the Corona made adjustments. A few of its revisions came from the scant data it received from other starships or outposts, but most were its own predictions on how boundaries were fluctuating in the current chaos.
According to their most recent data, the Traders had no outpost in this region and ISC had a small naval base. Kelric hoped the base still existed; it would increase their chances of safe passage and he might learn more from it about the current state of ISC.
Right now they were traveling in inversion. To invert, they added an imaginary component to their speed. Making speed complex removed the light-speed singularity from the equations of special relativity. The ship went "around" light speed the way a hovercar might leave the road to go around an infinitely high pole. Beyond the pole, they resumed their journey— at superluminal speeds, a realm of the bizarre.
A superluminal ship could go into the past. With a longing so intense it hurt, Kelric wished he could go back and stop the deaths of his family. If only. But every ship that had tried returning to normal space prior to when it inverted either failed or vanished, possibly into an alternate universe where it couldn't meddle with its own causality.
Even if he did somehow go into his past, the need for consistency would probably make it impossible to alter history. It was the time analog of a mundane situation, his magcar passing a slower car. To him, his car would stay still while the slow car went backward. People in the slow car thought they stayed still while he went forward. But they all saw the cars end up in the same place. Their view of how it happened differed, but was consistent. No paradoxes. So it was with time. Events had to be consistent whether he ran the reel of his life forward or backward. He couldn't undo what had happened, and wishing for the impossible only made his grief hurt more.
Superluminal travel bedeviled the flotilla. With no web, how did ships converse? Beam light back and forth? Useless. It could never catch up. Throw tachyons? As long as the particles remained superluminal, they could hop, skip, and jump all over time. Then there was time contraction and space dilation; the faster their ship went, the faster their time passed and the longer they stretched out relative to slower objects. A crew didn't notice on their own ship because they were at rest relative to it. But no two ships or particles moved at the same rate, and at such humongous speeds even small differences had big effects. How did you talk to ships smeared out across light-years, with time running at different rates on all of them? It was a mess.
Maccar regularly had Anatakala drop the ships into real space so Ty could try contacting the ISC base. In the normal universe nothing went faster than light, so no one expected a timely answer from the base when they were several
Similar Books
